The Myth of the Human

The Myth of the Human
J.P.Hooper


I

The cafe tables reached down the strand to the very edge of the sea; had he wanted to, Dr Richard Garth could have stretched out a leg and touched the surf with the toe of his loafer. He was happy; though he’d long guarded against outward displays of emotion.

Preston could see it, of course; he knew his friend well enough to tell when he was perfectly content. For a moment they just sat there, drinking in the scene of the Greek fishing village, before Preston returned to the matter they’d been discussing just before the waiter brought the frappes.

“So what do you think happened to them? Did they diminish, become extinct, disappear as if their existence were all the time contingent on people’s beliefs?; a beautiful idea, then, nothing more. Surely, Garth, you have your own pet theory. Or is it one you won’t deign to share until the book is out?”

“It’s not the core of the thing,” Garth said, the spell of their setting suddenly lifted, his eyes blinking once more in the cold light of rationality. “Peripheral matters, Preston. But, yes, I touch on it. For myths, as we know, are simply the expression of ideas. Poetically rendered. The Cyclops: the one-eyed man, sheep-herder, giant in aspect; what is he but as Joyce delineated him: a man who believes himself in control of the whole earth, and who judges his own tiny sphere the whole vast universe; a man whose will would wish to dominate unthinking cattle, and who raises himself up to towering proportions; who speaks Giantish? Medusa, the Gorgon, snake-haired, whose very physical adornments drip poison, and whose glance causes immobility, stagnation, the clotting of blood: the epitome of the antifeminist idea of women. So, you see, myth, all the delineations of such, are the renderings of the primitive’s outlook on his environment. Vengeful Furies: mad carrion-eaters indeed, for what else is guilt but the eater of moral rot?”

Preston was smiling. “It’s the standard line. Though I like the way you put things. But tell me…what is this "central" idea of yours?”

“I can’t detail it for you here. But I’ll give you a little more about the mythical imagination, something to think about over your afternoon "raki". Overwhelmingly the pagan myths are admonitory in intent.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, then, say they are a moral guide. They are the depository of the ancients’ wisdom on matters of beneficence and the consequences of deviation from accepted practices. We cannot all be hundred-eyed, or else, weary, we will be slain in our sleep; how many heads has our lust, in the swamp beds of our desire? Aberrations, Preston. Moral aberrations, warnings against deviance.”

“Damn, you, Garth. You’ll reduce it all to copulation.”

“On the contrary. There are many other kinds of aberration. Take the Bull Man of Knossos. Child of impure lust he may be, but what is he if not a fable about the self-entrapping liniments of wrath, the imprisonment brought about by passion? Led on by our rage, we are never free, and no better than the beast.

“Now, take, by way of contrast, the hero, who represents the straight and narrow road. He manages to navigate his way through the labyrinth of his passion, led on the leading-string of a young woman’s mercy. What does it suggest to you? That wrath and sexual appetite are tangled together, mingled in the gall of the male belly. Yes, very well, Theseus masters his passions in a way that the Minotaur cannot, but where would he be without the tempering influence of Ariadne? In other words, douse the flames of sexual appetite, and you douse the flames of wrath as well.”

“We’re back to sex, I see.”

“Oh, there’s much more to it than that.”

Garth was silent for a few moments, looking out across the lake-like stillness of the Euboean Gulf. It was late afternoon, and a nearby tamarisk threw its shadow over their table. The sound of bees drifted down from the nearby hillside, a soft, soothing, heady drone. If Garth believed in paradise on earth, this place would come close.

“I’m going to take a walk. Care to join me?”

Preston raised his eyebrows. It was the native way of refusing; he’d spent enough years in the country to have taken up many of their non-verbal gestures.

“I’m tired. Besides, I have work of my own to do. There’s the column for "Athens News", you know. Remember that the days are passing swiftly by, though there may be nothing here to remind you of the fact. This is not the timeless realm, Garth. It is not the Golden Age. Sooner or later you will have to return to Leicester, when the money and the department’s good will run out.”



II

This place was far even from the vestiges of civilisation, a sleepy, remote Greek village that moved to the rhythms of an earlier time. Doctor Richard Garth, electing to skip his usual siesta, had made his way back to his rented house on the slope above the village in order to collect some rudimentary things for a picnic. Though it was not really a picnic that he had in mind: the word was far too western and cosy for his taste. But now, as he climbed the little sheep gate into the meadow, ears filled with the droning of bees, he was carrying a bag of victuals: some bread and a tub of feta cheese, and most important to afternoon meditation, a small bottle of red wine.

Laying himself down on a grassy hummock, in the shade of some juniper bushes, he began the feast. The food was consumed, the wine quaffed, while all the while the late summer afternoon wrapped him in its enveloping mood of intoxicating repose. His eyelids began to droop, the murmur of a nearby spring and the rhythmic clicking of cicadas, contrived to transport him to a blissful, dreamlike state.

As he lay there, forgetting the control he usually exercised over his facial muscles, he heard aloud in his head the words of a poem long forgotten, and remembered now with exquisite pleasure:

To see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast -

He was lingering between waking and unconsciousness, in that twilight mood peculiar to Mediterranean countries when one is somewhat drunk and the heat of day drives one to some shady alcove or cool bower. The peace of the little dell now seemed to enwrap him, and the soothing sounds from the surrounding hills, the humming of bees in the hives and the rhythmic tinkle of goats’ bells, gradually died away, until there was nothing that was not of nature, or touched by human hand.

Had he fallen asleep? Suddenly, almost imperceptibly, something about the little bower appeared to have changed, though he was not aware of having passed into unconsciousness. At first he couldn’t tell what it was; then, as he looked from right to left, he realised that somehow it was the movement and quality of light, which hitherto had been creating dappled patterns on the grass, dissolving and forming itself anew: it had become crystallized, solid almost, like a net of lustrous pearls cast before his feet. Lifting his gaze, he beheld, as if for the first time, the sun.

Later he would remark that in all his forty six years of life he had never once looked on the sun with true, unhindered sight. That is because, he went on to explain, whatever we perceive does not pass directly from our organs of sense to our mind unconditioned; our idea of things outside ourselves, rooted in culture and conditioning, forces a received interpretation upon what we see. From the cradle, we are taught how to see and hear things, and do very little in the way of actually experiencing the external world with our natural senses. If our experience of the world were truly subjective, we would not live such lives; by the time we are able to gain understanding, reality has been explained for us.

The sun, as Garth saw it, was fixed in the heavens, unmoving, a great, bright disc of warm gold, giving off rich, unmixed light, brighter than the sun he knew yet somehow not dazzling the eye. Beneath it, the green of the bower had become such a pure, perfect green that his senses became quite confused; he felt that he could both taste and smell the leaves and the grass as he looked at them, and that the distinction between the senses was no longer clear to him; to look on things, in other words, was to hear them, to taste and smell them, as well. Next to that sun and the flora spreading around him, the gold and green he knew were as shadows, imperfectly rendered, like a great work of art modelled by a lesser craftsman. It is like Plato says, he told himself. Here is the realm of the eternal, immutable; these are ideal colours, ideal forms. Here they are in their true aspect, which the mind perceives as but the shadow of a memory.

From contemplation of the colours of the bower, his mind passed to meditation on the forms of the trees and the grasses, and the fruit hanging from the branches, more ripe and succulent than the fruit of any mortal tree. He had never seen the like anywhere.

Then, as he got to his feet, his eye caught movement. It was up on the right, on the rise above the dell, where a path climbed steeply towards the mountain. A figure was there – a human figure? No; nothing of man could have belonged in that perfected landscape: and in truth nothing of nature either, for it seemed to him that, down to each single blade of grass, this was in fact super-nature, nature unfallen, that he perceived. The figure he saw was a creature of myth: a centaur no less, bounding with lithe grace over the rocky slope, the lean, naked torso of a man rising above brown, velvet horse’s flanks; and yet the description offered here is inadequate, for this was not merely man above and horse below, as is depicted in art; this was a single creature, whose mannish aspect had something equine in it, and whose quadrupedal stance yet retained a hint of the human.

Before he could gaze long on the creature, which seemed not to notice him as it gambolled past, other movement caught his sight, and his head spun around as in a dance: first a lean, willowy dryad form stepping from behind a tree, with skin the colour of bark and hair plaited with berries, then a sprightly, light-footed faun, sporting a set of pan pipes, listening intently as if it could hear unheard music carried on the zephyr’s stream.

Centaurs champing on the bony hills, fauns bounding in the woodland glades, here was Arcadia in all its peaceful, heady, blissful, intoxicating, sleepy magnificence. Garth allowed himself to sink utterly into the dream, to submit willingly to fantasy, for such it surely was; and he did not once tremble as the vision danced around him, until, that is, the figure of the faun, which had been sporting just to his right, suddenly began to move towards him. Now, at close quarters, it did not seem a creature of fancy, as perfect and as far above mortal imperfection as that fancy had seemed. It began to speak, and with shuddering fear and insidious doubt he looked into the eyes of the god.

There was nothing high, or cold, or remote in the face of the immortal. It was as real – or more so – than every face that had ever been imprinted on Garth’s memory. Here was no pale artist’s rendering; no retreat from materiality, as in the sweeping, idealized lines of a painting. Immortal flesh, Garth realized, is no less tangible than my own.

“Is this dream or waking?” the creature spoke in tinkling, musical tones, as if echoing Garth’s thoughts all along. “And if I do dream, what has brought on this melancholy vision? You are Man, it seems to me, as our myths speak, and if all they say is true, you are a most unhappy creature.”

At first Garth could only stare, too numb to speak. Surely this was no dream; despite all his better judgement, he knew himself to be utterly awake; he could feel the god’s breath upon his cheek, see the bright gleam in its eyes, see the pulsing of blood or ichor beneath the shining skin. Yet how could this be?

“This cannot be real,” he said at last. “You are just a figment, a fantasy, wish-fulfilment given external form. All my life I have studied myth. I "understand" myth. Of course, hybrids of man and horse never existed, and neither did goat-footed gods. They are a delightful way of expressing an idea. Delightful, like this dell.”

“Delightful? Isn’t it bleak and withered enough for you? Why, not even the grass grows here anymore.”

Garth looked askance. “What do you mean? I’ve never seen such a place.”

“But all the world is thus forlorn,” the god said, gazing sadly about him. “Wasting away, bereft of joy. The earth is diminished, the mountains chained to the land, the sea and the horizon bound by fables Men call laws. There is no divine music to move the orbs in their heavenly spheres; only the vast, infinite silence of space; and at the centre, insignificant, his cry drowned as in a great vacuum, Man. That is what the fables tell us. And it is clearly a fable I have entered into.”

“A fable? Would you have me believe the whole thing reversed? Science, all our collective knowledge, they are the fable?”

The faun held him in his piercing gaze as he said: “There never was a creature Man. He is solely representative of an idea.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“That we immortals and gods, if we enchain ourselves thus, and let these wonders diminish, if we spoil the blessed earth at our feet, and reduce the universe to mere calculations, we become even as this creature, Man. Man was created by our poets, a symbol inspired by our muses, long ago, to warn us against forgetting that the world, even the material world, is infused with the divine. For though we are immortals, we exist still in the material universe, and we may remove our mind from the eternal aspect of finite things, we may allow our universe to diminish until we ourselves are diminished, insignificant, no longer gods but diminutive beings, petty and self-deceiving. We may become Men.”

“But this is absurd, dream though it is. Scientific knowledge does not diminish the world. If anything, it invests it with significance.”

“Strange words. In the fable of Man, we are told how Man stripped the world of all that was magical and noble. He turned the cosmos into an abyss, imagining vast, silent spaces between the heavenly bodies; he separated the earth into its constituent parts, reducing it to materials and atoms, divesting it of all beauty and wonder. His mind threw a shadow on everything, infusing things with doubt, until in the end he began to doubt the existence even of his own self.”

“It cannot be so,” Garth said, suddenly weary, slumping back down onto the grassy hummock, unwilling to listen to any more.

“What do you see here?” he said. “Don’t you see a vale of bliss?”

The god looked around him. “It is as I have said. The world is utterly grey, filled with shadows; every colour is diffuse, every material no more than a mass of particles, every note and every line of beauty broken and fragmented. I have become part of the myth. I see with the eyes of Man. Surely one of the greater gods, the Olympians, has put this spell of sleep upon me, so that I might remember what the fable means, how it warns us. Never cease to see the wonder in things. That is the morale of the fable. What power is given us, even to diminutive gods! The universe is laid before our feet; such is our mind that we may diminish and divide it to almost nothing, or we may infuse it with boundless wealth and beauty, when our mere gaze falls upon it. We may look with the eyes of gods, or with the shrinking gaze of Men.”

Garth felt himself falling out of consciousness – or into a new consciousness – and his eyes closed of their own accord. The last thing he heard, from the chiming, utterly beautiful speech of the god: “It is called the Myth of the Human. For what is myth but an admonition? A moral guide.”

When he opened his eyes, he was back in the sleepy meadow. It was as it had been before the dream, if dream it was, had come upon him; only the sun had moved further across the heavens, the shadows lengthened, and the balmy summer air had cooled towards evening. "How seldom have I remarked how beautiful this place is," he said to himself. "Truly their poets dreamed and imagined themselves in Arcadia, among the immortals, when they reposed in such places. A beautiful dream, indeed."

As he picked himself up and began to descend the hill path, he heard again some lines of a poem in his head:

The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy –

Wasn’t that the truth of it, however sad? He decided, then and there, to make an amendment to his work on myth. Representative of an idea, yes. But occasionally, if only for a languid afternoon, let us forget that these are myths and imaginings, let us instead let our guard down, and breathe the air of Arcadia, and allow ourselves to be intoxicated, if only for a short time, lest we forget how happy we were once, in our innocent state.

THE END

Note: the poems quoted are by, respectively, William Blake and W.B.Yeats.